London, Mar 22: Should you delete Facebook account or is there a way to use the "free"
social media platform without allowing it to make money off your personal data?
An Euronews report has said the revelations that the
Trump-linked political data firm Cambridge Analytica skirted Facebook's privacy
policies to suck up data on over 50 million Americans, and undercover videos
showing the company executives boasting about their deceptive campaign tactics
are just the nudge some users need to quit the platform entirely, judging by
the social media outcry that sent the hashtag #deletefacebook trending Tuesday.
As the saying goes, when the service is free, you are the
product.
"All data-based companies use collected data to make
money. Where we draw the line on what they can and can't do is the $64,000
question right now," said Raj Goyle, former deputy legal director of the
ACLU and co-CEO and co-founder of legal tech site Bodhala. "It's extremely
hard for people to safely use a platform when they are not completely sure what
they should be protecting themselves against, and what warning signs they
should be looking for."
But for those who can't quite quit Facebook, there are ways
to at least minimise the site's ability to monetize your personal information
without entirely losing the ability to see what cute thing your cousin's baby
gurgled this hour or what your co-worker thinks of his sandwich.
For starters, you can go into your applications tab. Under
"Apps, Websites, and Plugins" hit the edit tab and "Disable
Platform." This will stop your data from streaming through Facebook's API,
which is how third parties see all your activity. It will also prevent you from
logging in to other sites with Facebook, shut down your Instagram access, and
you won't be able to play platform-based apps like "Farmville"
anymore.
If that's too much and you're mainly just bothered about the
news that your friends who use an app could end up sharing your data even if
you never used the app or got any notification, then uncheck all the radio
buttons under the "Apps others use" heading for the pieces of data
you don't want your friends to share.
Each button warns you that might not be able to use certain
apps on Facebook and other sites, but if you just bookmark the address above
then you can go always go back and re-enable something if you later find a web
service isn't working the way you want it to.
The sharing doesn't stop there. "Even if your profile is
set to private," said Ron Schlecht, managing founder of cybersecurity firm
BTB Security, your likes, tagged photos, and other details, "can be made
available to people who are not your friends or outside your social network."
Some people try to hide by using a fake name or persona on
Facebook. But the cellphone number or email address they used to authenticate
themselves is connected to all that data, said Schlecht.
That personal identifier can then be connected by data
brokers to other sources of your data and reconnect your profile. So while you
might be hidden from your old high-school boyfriend or boss, the data miners
can still find you.
This is why it can be good to download a copy of all your
Facebook data. It can be a memento of all your Facebook activity, but it can
also be a learning experience to see just how much information you're sharing.
Go under "Settings" and select the option to download your data. It
will take a few minutes and the information will come in a few folders,
including one that divides up your friends based on whether they're part of
your "starting adult life" or "established adult life,"
along with a file of your facial recognition information called facedata.htm.
"In addition to raising questions about Facebook's role
in the 2016 presidential election, this news is a reminder of the inevitable
privacy risks that users face when their personal information is captured,
analyzed, indefinitely stored, and shared by a constellation of data brokers,
marketers, and social media companies," wrote EFF, a non-profit digital
privacy and rights advocacy group.
Ultimately, it may be a contradiction to think that anyone
can use a website designed to connect people and their data together and not
have their information exploited.
"It's not possible to use Facebook safely because the
platform is about putting vast amounts of personal information in one
place," said Goyle. "Technology is so well developed that it can
accurately analyze scraps of information to reconstruct whole profiles of
valuable user data. Facebook itself cannot fully protect users from companies
and people who want to make use of that information - nor does it seem to want
to." UNI